Presenting the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a theoretical grounding for studies in environmental humanities, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language draws on interdisciplinary research to argue that human and animal semiotic activities—including cultural and linguistic behaviors—are not separate phenomena, but rather exist on a continuum. Chapters include case studies of literary examples from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.

Living Oil: Petroleum and Culture in the American Century, is a work of environmental cultural studies that engages with a wide spectrum of cultural forms, from museum exhibits and oil industry tours to poetry, documentary film, fiction, still photography, novels and memoirs. The book’s unique focus is the aesthetic, sensory and emotional legacies of petroleum, from its rise to the preeminent modern fossil fuel during World War I through the current era of so-called Tough Oil.

Louise Westling’s Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (2013) includes contributions from experts in the interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism. The collection traces the development of ecocriticism from its origins in European pastoral literature to contemporary environmental literary scholarship [dealing with] an array of issues such as the place of the human within nature, ecofeminism, critical animal studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and climate change.

In searching American literary landscapes for what they can reveal about our attitudes toward nature and gender, The Green Breast of the New World considers symbolic landscapes in twentieth-century American fiction, the characters who inhabit those landscapes, and the gendered traditions that can influence the figuration of both of these fictional elements.

One of fourteen projected volumes of Henry Thoreau’s Journal in the Princeton Edition of his writings, Journal 6: 1853, edited by William Rossi, records how Thoreau divided his energies during this period between increasingly professional field studies as a naturalist in Concord and the revision of his Walden manuscript: two imaginative projects that fed one another.